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The American Prospect - articles by authorenWhy the Chicago Teachers Wonhttp://prospect.org/article/why-chicago-teachers-won
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<p>Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis speaks at a rally at Daley Plaza in Chicago.</p>
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<p>Consider the battle of Chicago’s teachers as a lesson for what’s ahead as the same struggle winds its way away around the nation.</p>
<p>For the nation’s beleaguered labor movement, the six-day strike by the Chicago Teachers Union that ended on Tuesday is proof that a strike is not suicide, as has been the fate lately for most unions.</p>
<p>Indeed, as the end neared and they were heady with an apparent win, the teachers’ talk catapulted from standing up for teachers to standing up for organized labor and ultimately to speaking for bullied, and exploited workers.</p>
<p>In the build up to the dispute, it didn’t seem likely that the union would be able to walk away. Not after the Illinois legislature required the union to win a strike vote by 75 percent of its members, and not after Mayor Rahm Emanuel fearlessly carried out a number of steps that only riled up the union. But it did, with the three-year deal that its 26,000 teachers will soon vote on.</p>
<p>The union played its cards well. It honed an internal campaign that produced a 90 percent strike vote and kept its rank-and-file largely solidified until the end, when fired-up union members balked briefly at okaying the deal without mulling it over in detail. </p>
<p>At the same time the union delivered a message to the public that tamped down any serious or loud protests from parents and community groups. The anti-strike campaign waged by Emanuel’s allies and assorted foes of teachers’ unions surprisingly gained little traction.</p>
<p>Does this mean that others will get similar results if they carefully copy and paste the Chicago teachers’ strategy?</p>
<p>Probably not.</p>
<p>There are too many forces at play in school districts across the country to assume that the Chicago model will work for them. But it does provide a moral boost for unions that might otherwise avoid sticking their necks out.</p>
<p>One of the new dynamics is the message that Emmanuel has sent to other Democrat mayors and politicians. He didn’t flat out diss the union the way the Republicans bash teachers’ unions, but he made it clear that they were selfishly holding back progress – a basic theme for GOP leaders and others who rant about “bully” unions.</p>
<p>If more Democrats nudge closer to Emmanuel’s tough guy take on the Chicago teachers, then the national teachers unions and organized labor as a whole has to reassess their partnership with them. But the teachers also need to better show their commitment to change, and not just for themselves. Without well-announced policies and game plan to carry them out, their foes will continue to hammer them.</p>
<p>But does anyone have solid, indisputable answers to how schools should fairly and accurate evaluate their teachers? It doesn’t seem so. And what are officials to do with their current staff as they shut schools because of low student performances, financial problems, shrinking enrollments and the growing tug of charter schools? Toss them onto the unemployment line and risk throwing out years of experience and commitment?</p>
<p>Saying Chicago’s teachers have not faced a new evaluation system in decades, city officials wanted student performances to account for as much a 40 percent of a teacher’s rating. Union officials warned that the city’s plans could mean several thousands jobs cuts in a few years. Instead, the contract sets student performance measures to the minimum required by Illinois law: 25 percent in the first year of the contract rising to 30 percent in the last year.</p>
<p>During the walkout, the union and others howled about the inadequacies of judging teachers based so heavily on their students’ performances. And as a New York Times chart shows, most of the nation’s larger school systems have are wrangling with this.</p>
<p>Fearful about school closings that have trimmed jobs as well as the CTU’s ranks, the union fought for a recall policy to protect laid off teachers. The union compromised, agreeing to a deal that will require half of all vacancies to be filled by teachers hurt by school closings. But Emanuel said school principals will have greater flexibility than before in their hiring.</p>
<p>Protecting its ranks is crucial for the union. Chicago school officials pled financial distress before the strike, and the teachers’ 7 percent total pay hike over the three-year contract along with other pay boosts raises the likelihood of school closings. So, too, school officials appear intent on bolstering the charter schools, which today have over 50,000 students.</p>
<p>Along with teachers’ complaints about inadequate facilities for themselves, and inadequate services for their students, another, perhaps bigger, issue bubbled up during the strike. It’s one that Chicago’s teachers share with others and it’s probably the most daunting for the nation’s schools.</p>
<p>It’s sense of unfairness and blindness to the reality the teachers say they face.</p>
<p>Chicago’s teachers work in schools marked by economic and racial isolation, schools where more than four out of five students are minorities as well as low income. As the teachers and others have pointed out, the schools in some of the most economically impacted and racially isolated neighborhoods in Chicago have suffered the greatest number of closings and with questionable results for many of the students. <a href="http://www.wbez.org/content/mapping-10-years-school-closures">http://www.wbez.org/content/mapping-10-years-school-closures </a>So, too, one of the gripes aired by teachers during the strike was that black teachers lately have shouldered a heavy share of layoffs.</p>
<p>Chicago teachers deal with students and communities marked and traumatized by violence. Yet the funding for anti-violence efforts, like many other basic social services, has been trimmed back due to financial problems.</p>
<p>The police have saturated some black and Latino neighborhoods, going after gangs, whom they say are behind the spike in violence. But neighbors in these communities increasingly say the gangs are not the sole cause. And the Police Superintendent recently admitted that the police “are treading water” in their effort to contain the pool of blood.</p>
<p>The mayor has cajoled neighbors to speak out more and show greater cooperation with police to stop the crime, as if the communities have been blind to the mayhem. The regular stream of anti-violence marches in the streets and the flight of thousands of blacks out of Chicago in recent years seems a message that the community knows very well what’s happening.</p>
<p>As a nation, we are bedeviled by the question of how best to teach our youth. But in places like Chicago, the challenge is more intense and basic. Schools in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angles, New York and on countless other places are asked to come up with solutions to problems that others long ago gave up on. The welfare system no longer redirects stunted ambitions. The prisons and courts no longer rehabilitate.</p>
<p>But the schools are not allowed to falter.</p>
<p>This was the real issue that the teachers and Chicago officials were arguing over.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 14:14:28 +0000214557 at http://prospect.orgStephen FranklinIs Chicago the Next Wisconsin?http://prospect.org/article/chicago-next-wisconsin
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<p>Chicago public school teacher Michelle Harton walks a picket line outside Morgan Park High School in Chicago on the second day of a strike in the nation's third-largest school district.</p>
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<p>Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanual and school officials say only so much money can be squeezed out for teachers’ salaries. More important, they want major changes to fix schools that they say are failing the city’s kids. On the other side of the table, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has its doubts about the finances and frets about protecting its rank and file. It especially doesn’t like the way charter schools are opening and public schools are closing, wiping out its members’ jobs.</p>
<p>That’s the much-reduced nub of the dispute between the Chicago Teachers Union and city officials, which has drawn 26,000 teachers into the streets and thrown the nation’s third largest school system into a tizzy. Outside Chicago, you can find the same mega issues pumping up like storm clouds in school districts across the U.S. This is why what happens here could be an omen for school districts, stirred on by a heap of forces ranging from deeply deflated budgets to educational reformers’ complaints to dissatisfied parents to charter-school activists and ultimately to anti-union advocates.</p>
<p>Taking office as mayor last year, Rahm Emanuel set the cycle in motion when he aligned his administration clearly with those who have decried the heartbreaking conditions in the nation’s public schools. He brought in Jean-Claude Brizard as the new schools chief executive, someone with a reputation for supporting school reform but a history of feuding with teachers. Emanuel vowed to lengthen the school day and made a number of steps to nudge the union to go along.</p>
<p>The mayor named a school board in sync with the swirl of reforms popular across the country. He got support for his efforts from the Democrat-led state legislature, which made it more difficult last year for the Chicago teachers to strike with a law that required 75 percent approval for a strike. (In this case, the teachers voted by more than 90 percent to walk out.) It was part of a package that included moves to link teachers’ tenure and security to their performance.</p>
<p>In a city where Democrats have seemingly ruled forever and where unions either got their sway or were not attacked head on, Emanuel changed that formula by standing up to the union. He also got off to a bad start in early talks with the union’s president, who had been elected on a campaign of showing more spine in negotiations. Their toxic beginning may have added an extra jinx to the contract talks. The union has since made Emanuel’s treatment of it a rallying point, saying it wouldn’t give in to a “bully.”</p>
<p>Whatever the union thinks of Emanuel is hardly as important as what comes out of their contract dispute. If a big-city Democrat with such outstanding party credentials as Emanuel is seen as squashing the teachers’ union, that doesn’t bode well for the Democrats nationally in their quest for union voters. Nor does it help the American Federation of Teachers as it fends off challenges in places far less friendly to unions than Chicago.</p>
<p>As is the case for many school districts, pay is a basic issue for both sides in Chicago, especially since Emanuel canceled a pay hike for teachers last year, saying the schools couldn’t afford it. The city went into negotiations this year, offering a 2 percent annual pay hike, and the teachers replied by asking for as much as 30 percent over two years. School officials countered with a 16 percent pay hike over four years, according to news reports.</p>
<p>But a more critical issue for the union nowadays is guaranteeing a future for its members—not an idle concern here and across the country. One threat comes from charter schools, which have taken off in the last decade and in Chicago have reached a total enrollment of 52,000 students at 118 schools, according to the <em>Chicago Tribune</em>. Though these schools’ performance has been mixed, school officials seem intent on opening more with public funds as they close poorly performing public schools. This is a losing proposition for the union since the charter schools are largely non-union. They also lower the negotiation bar for the CTU since they provide lower salaries. The possibility of deep and steady job cuts as a result of changes throughout the school system also adds to the union’s need to lock in a recall policy to protect its members from disappearing from the city’s payroll. This reportedly is one of the key stumbling blocks in negotiations.</p>
<p>An even more contentious issue is teacher evaluations, a point on which teachers and school officials nationally are locked in a power struggle. Chicago school officials have been pushing to link pay and seniority to performance—and not seniority alone—as well as to carrying out the evaluation system called for by the state legislature last year. The union has pushed back, however, warning that the new evaluation system could result in the loss of 6,000 jobs in two years. Too much of the new evaluation system will be based on students’ standardized tests, according to the union.</p>
<p>Who is going to win the struggle?</p>
<p>There’s no question that some of Chicago’s schools, like those in many communities across the U.S., are overwhelmed by poverty and are suffering from decades of neglect by school headquarters and political leaders. Once considered “dropout factories,” Chicago’s schools have bolstered their graduation rates in recent years. But as a University of Chicago study pointed out last year, the overall graduation rate doesn’t tell the whole story. The study found “large improvements in outcomes” in high schools but “very little” in the elementary schools. Average test scores were at levels “well below” those used to measure success in college. And black students were increasingly falling ever further behind others.</p>
<p>In one of the nation’s most segregated school districts, students in some black and Latino neighborhoods are besieged by an unprecedented cycle of violence. Troubled by this, Chicago officials were able to bring in hefty amounts of outside financial support for anti-violence efforts in recent years. But those funds have severely dried up—the violence has not.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, the violence may not be as severe, but it would be hard to find school districts with equally large numbers of poor and minority students without the same education problems and gaps. Elsewhere, the daily despair encountered by teachers and parents may be as troubling. But because the Chicago school system is so enormous and enormously troubled, the solution to its woes transcends its borders. That’s why the teachers' strike matters to more than 350,000 Chicago kids.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:52:11 +0000214251 at http://prospect.orgStephen FranklinBefore the Revolutionhttp://prospect.org/article/revolution
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://prospect.org/site/fancybox/jquery.fancybox-1.3.4.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /><script type="text/javascript" src="http://prospect.org/site/fancybox/jquery.fancybox-1.3.4.pack.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://prospect.org/site/fancybox/jquery.easing-1.4.pack.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://prospect.org/site/fancybox/jquery.mousewheel-3.0.4.pack.js"></script><p>After the policemen had sodomized the bus driver with a broomstick, and after one of the officers had sent a cell-phone video of the attack to other bus drivers in downtown Cairo to make clear that the cops could do as they pleased, and after someone had given the video to Wael Abbas, who posted it on his blog, something unusual happened -- at least, something unusual for Egypt.</p>
<p>The video went viral on the Internet. Two officers were charged, convicted, and ultimately given three-year prison terms.</p>
<p>It was an extraordinary moment, this sudden burst of justice back in 2006. Few have dared to point their fingers at police wrongdoing in Egypt. And it's even rarer that the culprits have been punished.</p>
<p>The tumult that has rocked Egypt this winter was clearly sparked by the Tunisian revolution. But the Egyptian uprising didn't begin on Jan. 25. It was rooted in the waves of workers' strikes and protests; the explosion of the Internet as a rallying megaphone for dissent about government abuse, corruption, and a vampire economy where a few flourish while many struggle; and a growing willingness by reporters, writers, and human-rights groups to tell the truth in the face of great risks. </p>
<p>The roots could be seen by anyone who has paid attention to the upheavals that have marked Egyptian society these last few years. But they were dismissed up until now as inconsequential and insufficient. </p>
<p>After all, hadn't the regime brutally slapped down bloggers and anyone who dared to stick out his or her neck? Hadn't it crushed and humiliated political opponents? Hadn't it cowed its college graduates into accepting high unemployment rates and menial low-wage work or into leaving the country in order to land a decent job?</p>
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<div style="font-size: 12px;"><em>Slideshow</em>: <b>The Uprising in Egypt</b></div>
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<p>Nobody counted on these disparate groups -- including Muslims and Christians -- coming together in the streets. Nobody calculated the emotional impact on the Egyptian people when it became clear that the republic of fears and lies was no longer almighty.</p>
<p>And nobody counted on unsung heroes like Wael Abbas. Over the past three years, when officials denied attacks by groups of men on young women in downtown Cairo, Abbas provided videos that showed the opposite. He put up videos depicting police brutally attacking demonstrators. </p>
<p>Nothing in his background suggested that Abbas would become an inspiration for a generation of bloggers. (Cairo's "official" newspaper, Al Ahram, called him "Egypt's most well-known blogger.") A recent college graduate from a working-class family when I first met him in 2007, Abbas knew his way around the Internet. He had friends who did as well. But what set him apart was his need to tell the truth that wasn't being told and his unwillingness to give up. Others quit when things got rough. Abbas didn't. He seemed emboldened by the impact he was having. The arrival of the Internet and the explosion of Egyptian bloggers, he said, created the "genie" that the government couldn't put back in the bottle.</p>
<p>Abbas paid a price for his truth telling. Enemies have tied him up in lawsuits. He has searched for steady work, plainly hindered by his reputation as a dissident. Several years ago, I urged him to consider work elsewhere, but he insisted he couldn't leave Egypt. He steadily kept up his blog. When the uprising began this January, he showed some of the first pictures of injured protesters in Alexandria. After his brief detention by police in February, he told ABC News that he had gone into hiding and that many of his friends had been seized by police.</p>
<p>Over the past couple of years, Abbas was far from the only one posting police misconduct online. Last June, Khalid Said, a young businessman, died at an Alexandria cafe. The police claimed that he had suffocated from a plastic bag of marijuana. Two autopsies backed up the police's claims, authorities declared.</p>
<p>Eyewitness accounts, spread via the Internet and eventually to the Egyptian newspapers, told a very different story. They described how the 24-year-old had been dragged out of the cafe and beaten by police. They said he had been targeted by police allegedly because he had posted a video online that showed officers sharing the results of a drug bust. Yet the most compelling items posted online of what happened at the cafe were photos depicting someone who had been so badly beaten that his face was grotesquely contorted. </p>
<p>Thousands joined the Facebook page protesting Said's death. Demonstrations broke out in Alexandria and elsewhere. The government quickly charged the two police officers named by witnesses not with murder but with unlawful arrest and excessive use of force.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>While most of the wrongs recounted on the Internet over the past couple of years have not been righted, they have been part of the process of building the movement that's taken to Cairo's streets this winter. </p>
<p>When workers staged protests in 2008 in al Mahala al Kubra, a grim textile-manufacturing town, a Facebook page rallied more than 100,000 supporters across the country. That spurred the formation of a group known as the April 6 Youth Movement, a loose collection of tech-savvy youths, intellectuals, workers, and many from the vast ranks of the unemployed. Their online success encouraged them to join in a call for a national strike in 2009. Hardly anyone showed up, however. The organizers blamed the fizzled turnout on a government crackdown and tight police presence.</p>
<p>The growing protests of Egyptian workers has been a particular focus of journalist and photographer Hossam el Hamalawy, a blogger who's been deep into the action in Cairo's streets this winter. When labor protests accelerated several years ago, his blog was often the place where journalists, who would normally ignore such events, could go to see what was happening. Hamalawy and I met years ago when I was working with an Egyptian human-rights group on a guide for bloggers on how to cover the news -- and how to avoid problems with the government as well. (Fearful about his obsession with his work, I've typically ended our talks by reminding him that one cannot live on coffee and cigarettes alone.) </p>
<p>Hamalawy's photos have shown the faces of Egyptian workers as they've overcome their fears to confront their employers -- and, at times, their government. Over the past six years, more than 2 million workers have joined in more than 3,300 occupations, demonstrations, or other forms of protest -- a development without precedent in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt. In nearly all cases, they were protesting on their own because their unions are shells for the government. On occasion, they have won their battles, with the government conceding just enough to deflate the confrontations.</p>
<p>The workers have protested lethal workplace conditions. They've protested a minimum wage for beginning workers that was stuck at $7 a month for more than 20 years. They protested the government's broken promises of economic reforms. Their biggest victory came last autumn when the government, after fighting lawsuits from labor and human-rights groups, grudgingly boosted the wage base to about $70 a month, still far below what workers say they need. </p>
<p>That may seem like a heaping increase. But state officials last November told Al Ahram that a family of four needs to earn more than $120 a month to escape poverty. And for hundreds of thousands of workers in the underground economy, there are no pay rules, no benefits, no workplace protections. They get whatever the boss gives them. That is why about at least 40 percent of the nation lives on $2 a day and why one out of five Egyptians does not earn enough to meet his or her basic food needs, according to a 2008 United Nations Development Program report. Many workers have slipped further into despair as privatization efforts have trimmed already low benefits and wages, taken away their slim hopes of job security, and fed into a strong sense of outrage.</p>
<p>Last summer, the workers' fury reached a crescendo as disgruntled employees from one factory after another gathered in front of the Egyptian parliament on one of Cairo's busiest streets. Such an in-your-face display of angry workers in front of the government was unprecedented. The demonstrators slept on the sidewalks for days on end, often dressing in rags to show their plight. </p>
<p>One broiling day last year, I hung out with workers from one factory, who pounded drums and banged rocks on police barricades to draw attention from the motorists passing by. "We are not going to fight or make trouble," vowed Khaled el Shishawy, a short, muscular man in his 40s who had worked at a factory that had shut down, and was the protesters' acknowledged leader. To calm an earlier protest by the same workers, the government had promised months earlier to help them get severance payments. But nothing happened, so the workers were back on the streets. </p>
<p>The next day, police and government thugs swept all of the demonstrators away from the parliament building, saying that the workers had armed themselves and were violent -- claims discounted by Egyptian journalists who had been on the scene. When I met with el Shishawy and leaders of other worker protests several days later, they were not discouraged at all. They swore they would carry on. The problem was their whole effort was so new they were not sure how to organize themselves. They wanted to tell the world about their struggle, but they had no idea how to do so.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>Informing the world about what's happening in Egypt hasn't been easy or safe even for those with the right skills. Novelist Alaa al Aswany tried for years to tell the story of the government's corruption and abuse and its blindness toward the massive numbers of poor. State censors blocked the publication of nearly all of his books, and he was planning to leave Egypt. One book, however, got through, and a publisher took a chance on it. The novel, The Yacoubian Building, set sales records in Egypt about a decade ago and became a widely popular movie. </p>
<p>The story is a melange of Egyptians' woes. It tells of people so poor they live in shacks on rooftops, of a ruling party that thrives on kickbacks, and of police torture that drives the young into the arms of Muslim extremists.</p>
<p>Because he could not rely on his income as a writer, al Aswany kept up his job as a dentist. Even after the book's success, he kept his practice, in a decrepit office building not far from where I lived in Cairo's Garden City. When I visited him several years ago, he was headed for one of the nighttime salons he held weekly for young writers. But the salons had run into problems. The government was pressuring restaurants to deny him space to hold his meetings. Al Aswany constantly had to search for new places.</p>
<p>For years, al Aswany had written a column for Al Destour, a small, struggling leftist paper. Last year, he began writing for El Shourok, a new, independent newspaper that is closer to the political center. He stopped writing last fall, however, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, after the newspaper's bosses warned him and another columnist about "external pressures" to tone down their content.</p>
<p>His column vanished at about the same time that Ibrahim Eissa, a long-term journalism gadfly who has faced dozens of court cases under the government's press laws, was fired as editor of Al Destour. The new owners of the newspaper said it had nothing to do with his views. But Eissa insisted that he had been fired after he refused to kill an article written by Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who was building up his status as a leader of a growing political opposition.</p>
<p>During the past year, though, incidents of censorship and the repression of news and opinions have themselves become more of a topic for public discussion. Salama Ahmed Salama, a columnist for Al Ahram, weighed in with his view of Eissa's firing. </p>
<p>"An invisible hand is in control of the media," he wrote. "The invisible hand determines the degree to which freedom of expression and publication is permitted. This invisible hand uses the owners of the media, forcing them to shut down mouths that talk and break pens that have gone far."</p>
<p>What's notable here is that Al Ahram is not only the nation's largest daily newspaper but the government's mouthpiece. In the deadening tradition of Arab government-run newspapers, it is rare not to see the face of the ruler -- Hosni Mubarak -- on the front page greeting some dignitary. News that makes the government look bad either doesn't exist or appears as a small item way back among the advertisements.</p>
<p>Salama's is a brave and unusual voice. To be sure, amid competition from TV and new papers, Al Ahram has struggled to reshape itself and loosen its authoritarian demeanor. But its role as the government's voice from on high to the masses still pervades many of its workers' thinking. I was reminded of this during a training session I put on last year for Al Ahram staffers.</p>
<p>The goal was to create issue-oriented stories that draw in readers by first telling about particular persons or describing a particular scene. This is long a tradition in the West but not in government-run Arab newspapers that like to tell its readers what to think.</p>
<p>Much to my pleasure, the writers and editors embraced the concept. For their homework assignments, many also came up with compelling stories about poor people struggling to survive in Cairo, and the group seemed pleased with the results. But at the end of our meetings, a young editor, who had seemed enthused by the work, complained that the concept didn't fit his newspaper.</p>
<p>"This is not the way we Egyptians think. We don't emphasize the individual or put the individual first," he said.</p>
<p>That's no longer entirely true, however -- not since Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt Today) appeared in 2004, followed by one or two other independent newspapers. Al Masry Al Youm doesn't belong to the government or to a party or a religious group as do most Egyptian newspapers. It has emphasized features and investigative reporting. And it has turned loose young reporters, who have pushed back barriers never challenged before. During this winter's uprising, it reported accusations that thugs captured during looting had cards identifying them as police.</p>
<p>Indeed, soon after the Jan. 25 uprising began, the paper's editor, Magdi el Gallad wrote:</p>
<p>"The 25 January 'Day of Anger' was a turning point for mass politics under Mubarak as thousands of demonstrators broke a fear barrier that for decades had kept Egyptians off the streets out of concerns for their safety. Those days are coming to a close."</p>
</div></div></div>Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:45:22 +0000149193 at http://prospect.orgStephen FranklinThe Hands That Feed Ushttp://prospect.org/article/hands-feed-us-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Because so little has changed, her years in the fields seem to melt together. She works under abusive crew bosses and beside people who are sick but cannot take time off to get care. She works alongside youngsters less than 12-years-old, the U.S. legal limit for child labor, because some families need every hand to get by. Working from sunup to darkness without drinking water or a toilet nearby to relieve herself, she goes in the bushes, if there are any.</p>
<p>"It's the same situation. There is no difference," says Florabeth de la Garza, resting at the end of the day's work in a sleazy, airless motel room in a southwest Michigan farm town. The room is just big enough for a bed.</p>
<p>It's been twenty-three years since she first crossed the border from Mexico and slipped into the migrant stream. One of few possessions that she drags everywhere is a suitcase full of her diaries and photographs. They are her record of lives abused and broken in the fields.</p>
<p>You would think that after many decades of farmworker abuse and increased public awareness of such conditions, life would be far better today for the Florabeth de la Garzas who harvest and process what we eat. But that is not the case -- even with federal and state protections and the efforts of unions and worker-advocacy and human-rights groups.</p>
<p>Rather, as nonunion operations have made inroads into once heavily unionized industries such as food processing, packinghouse workers have been maimed and crippled. And farmworkers' lives today are as brutal as they were years ago. Both of these groups of workers suffer from hazards, abuses, and poor working conditions that have only worsened in some cases, say union officials and legal-rights, immigrant, and worker advocacy groups.</p>
<p>These workplace hells persist because of gaps in the labor laws and understaffed ranks of state and federal inspectors, and because a largely nonunion, immigrant workforce in the fields and packinghouses is terrified to speak up. These conditions are also the result of a food-supply system concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, where the costs have been driven down on workers' backs.</p>
<p>In the Michigan fields where de la Garza picked blueberries this summer, for example, she was getting 40 cents a pound, about 10 cents a bucket less than she would have earned a decade ago, according to officials with Farmworker Legal Services in Kalamazoo, Michigan.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>The federal government could make a difference in these workers' lives without getting bogged down in a political battle in Congress. Relying on an executive order, it could set codes of labor conduct for firms from whom it buys billions annually in food for its school-lunch, military, and numerous others meal programs.</p>
<p>The government would be taking a page from the anti-sweatshop campaigns that have publicly embarrassed clothing companies into cleaning up the labor conditions at their factories at home and abroad, and from the history of affirmative -- action executive orders governing federal contractors. A similar strategy was used by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a community organization based in Immokalee, Florida, when it demanded that giant food corporations provide better conditions and pay for the workers picking crops for the companies' middlemen suppliers.</p>
<p>Arturo S. Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers union, says the idea of linking the government's food purchases to a code of conduct for workers makes good sense. "The traditional ways of trying to improve conditions for farmworkers have not been successful," he explains. Government action could affect a sizeable number of workers; the UFW estimates that the government buys about $4 billion yearly in fruits, vegetables, eggs, and dairy products from vendors.</p>
<p>This would benefit consumers as well as workers. "If you have a group of workers who are not treated with respect and are eking out a living the best way they can, they are not going to take the time to tell you what's happening in the fields," Rodriguez says. And what's happening affects food safety as well as worker treatment. UFW officials point to academic studies showing infected workers' ties to contamination outbreaks in the U.S. involving strawberries, scallions, leaf lettuce, basil, green onions, and parsley.</p>
<p>Paradoxically, because farmworkers are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) it is easier for government to improve conditions by executive order, if government would only act. Courts have held that government may not use its contracting power to punish companies that violate the Wagner Act's right-to-organize provisions, since that act is intended to be the prime legal structure for collective bargaining -- though it is notable for not being enforced. But because farmworkers are outside the Wagner Act, the president could use executive orders to compel fair treatment of workers, including recognizing their right to organize, wherever a government contractor was involved.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>Worker safety continues to be another enforcement failure. Patty Lovera, an assistant director of Food and Water Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, says her talks with food inspectors and others have convinced her that the speed of the assembly line at slaughter houses is critical for both safe food and safe conditions for workers. "If there were slower line speeds you would be more successful in taking out parts that are dangerous," she says. Lovera is also convinced that the lack of sick leave for workers creates a food danger. "If you don't get paid [to stay home] when you are sick, and you are handling food, there is a food-safety connection."</p>
<p>When researchers from the Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest talked with meatpackers across Nebraska several years ago, they heard complaints similar to those described in a 2005 Human Rights Watch report on U.S. meatpacking.</p>
<p>Workers told of "crippling line speeds" and physically abusive jobs that left some with hands curled like chicken claws. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had suffered on-the-job injuries in the last year, a much higher percentage than the one projected nationally by the meatpacking industry. They complained about understaffing that trapped them in grueling assignments. And they described abusive supervisors who ignored workers' pleas to use a bathroom. "I know of three people who urinated and pooped in their pants and afterward [the supervisor] just laughed at you," one worker told the Lincoln, Nebraska-based researchers.</p>
<p>Especially striking was the fact that nearly all of the workers realized they had rights, but less than a third thought their rights mattered. This was a sad comment on the reality of the Meatpacking Industry Worker Bill of Rights that Nebraska had passed a decade earlier. The state also has a coordinator to make sure workers' rights are not ignored.</p>
<p>Darcy Tromanhauser, director of the Appleseed Center's immigrant program, recalls a conversation with a former food inspector who said workers with dull knives "were so desperate to sharpen their knives and weren't given time and so they sharpened them on the floor." But enforcement remains spotty.</p>
<p>Don Lipton, a spokesperson for the powerful American Farm Bureau in Washington, D.C., signals industry resistance to these worker-protection efforts. The Ag industry would look with "some alarm" at any effort to increase its costs or add more regulations, Lipton warns. "The industry has done a lot of self-regulation to be in compliance with better standards for workers," he says.</p>
<p>As for raising costs, UFW officials say a a 5-cent increase in the price of a pint of strawberries could result in a 50 percent increase in workers' wages. Likewise, officials from the United Food and Commercial Workers union point out that pay hikes for workers are likely to benefit taxpayers. Better conditions mean fewer workers on public assistance, Medicaid, or food stamps -- services on which many workers at low-wage, nonunion packinghouses rely, UFCW spokesperson Scott Frotman explains.</p>
<p>The unions want the government to bar vendors from retaliating against workers who speak out about health issues. Likewise, they would like to see vendors barred from charging the government for the costs of fighting union organizing drives. Even more important, they say the government should bar companies that violate labor laws.</p>
<p>UFCW officials point to Agriprocessors, Inc., the Kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, as an example of a nonunion workforce where troubles festered in silence for years. In 2007 the union had revealed a large number of federal citations regarding unsafe food conditions at the plant. But the true conditions at the plant did not emerge until a massive immigration raid there in 2008. Soon after the raid, the mostly immigrant workforce, many of them without papers, told officials about putting in 12-hour shifts for days in a row and being cheated out of their wages. Some workers on the cutting line were as young as 13. "When there is a union in the facility, workers are more likely to come forward," Frotman says.</p>
<p>"In union plants, contracts regulate everything from line speed to equipment to establishing employee-safety committees," he adds. His union represents about 30 percent of the workers at major poultry plants, 55 percent at leading beef-packing plants, and 75 percent at the major pork-processing plants.</p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>Which takes us back to Florabeth de la Garza.</p>
<p>Are her work and the jobs of thousands in the food industry so abusive that the government needs to take an extra step to make a difference? UFW President Rodriguez offers a story to explain the situation.</p>
<p>He tells of a recent meeting with a group of elementary schoolchildren in California's San Joaquin Valley, where he asked how many of them work in the fields alongside their parents. "About half of them raised their hands, and I was surprised," he says. "People are still fighting for the very basics."</p>
<p>He praises U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis for boosting inspections in the farm fields. But he says the existing inspection force is far from enough to protect the nation's more than 2.5 million farmworkers. As an example, he points to California, where 15 farmworkers have died from heat exposure since the state laid down strict regulations in 2005 to protect workers. "And that is a state where we have a regulation," he says. Most states, he adds, do not even track such figures, let alone have regulations.</p>
<p>Dismayed by the conditions facing many of the 90,000 farmworkers who flock to Michigan, Thomas K. Thornburg, head of the Farmworker Legal Services offices in Kalamazoo, asked the Michigan Civil Rights Commission to investigate the situation. The organization held a number of hearings last year and issued a report in March 2010.</p>
<p>The report described farmworkers living in "extremely substandard" housing, sometimes with no water, forcing farmworkers to spend their earnings on water. It told of families so jammed together in camp housing that diseases spread quickly from "family to family and from families to strangers."</p>
<p>The commission cited workers' accounts of being cheated out of their wages but not speaking up because they were undocumented or because they feared losing the work. One farmworker told the commission about a family of three that earned only $46 for nine hours of work.</p>
<p>Such complaints are not new to Teresa Hendricks, director of the Migrant Legal Aid office in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "Conditions are getting worse," she bluntly says. "There's a lack of inspections, and it's just cheaper not to comply with the regulations."</p>
<p>What worries her and others is the flood of workers joining the regulars in Michigan's fields. Some are former factory employees out of work because of immigration crackdowns. Some are young men coming up from Mexico. A few are newcomers hungry for work.</p>
<p>Because it is hard to get in a full day's earnings, families will try to put their underage children in the fields, de la Garza says. They want to make as much as they can before immigration officials catch them, she says. "There's a trailer with only two rooms and 18 people from three families living there," she adds. "They know it is wrong, but they don't say anything because they don't have papers."</p>
<p>But de la Garza, who travels the yearly migrant route from Florida to Michigan to Colorado and back again, will write about it in her diaries, a cruel tale that barely changes.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:35:18 +0000148871 at http://prospect.orgStephen FranklinForgotten Corners of the Economyhttp://prospect.org/article/forgotten-corners-economy-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>Another dead day on the street corner and Gonzalo Mejia is wondering how he will get by. He's been finding work just one or two days a week lately. Worse yet, a contractor recently stiffed him out of $400 worth of pay.</p>
<p>"All the time there is less work," grumbles Mejia, a short, muscular man in his mid-50s. His pals nod in agreement as they wait like hawks, ready to swoop down on the next contractor who pulls up. But it's well past 9 A.M., only three cars have trolled by in search of workers, and hardly anyone has budged off the street. </p>
<p>Yet it is not just the disappearance of work that troubles him and the 150 or so men killing time at Milwaukee and Belmont, once Chicago's busiest street corner for day laborers. Everything has become so difficult, so frustrating, so dangerous. For workers with minimal protections against employers who steal from their wages or sometimes leave them dead or maimed, life has lately become bare existence. </p>
<p>Before the housing bubble burst and the economy collapsed, the day laborers here tried to hold the line with employers at $10 an hour for basic work. Nowadays the going rate has dropped to $8 an hour, and some more desperate workers have grabbed $5-an-hour offers, saying it beats waiting around. </p>
<p>Day laborers here and across the U.S. have long suffered from employers who cheat them out of their wages. But there are more complaints recently about employers who give them bad checks or hire them at one rate and then pay less when the work is done or who vanish when it comes time to pay up. </p>
<p>"They say the job is for two or three days and they'll pay you when it's done. And then they disappear. Most of the guys have the same problems," explains Mejia, who was earning $18 an hour as a carpenter when there was work. Nowadays, he takes $12 an hour if he can get it. </p>
<p>Latino immigrants dominate this and nearly all of Chicago's day-labor street corners. But there has also been a rush of U.S. citizens, many of them newly unemployed or low-wage workers, as well as other immigrant groups. </p>
<p>Some day laborers will even continue working for weeks when they have not been paid. "They need money so desperately; they keep working, hoping to get paid. But they don't, and that's sad," says Kasia Tarczynska, a Polish-speaking worker with the Latino Union of Chicago, which serves day laborers. She works with the Eastern European day laborers -- Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Bosnians, Albanians, and others -- who have been showing up increasingly on Chicago's street corners and who suffer from roughly the same problems and abuses as the rest of the day laborers. Many are also undocumented immigrants and because of their limited English skills and the street corner's pack mentality, they stick to themselves. </p>
<p>The flood of new workers has worsened conditions, say the men and workers from the Latino Union, because the increased supply has driven down the wages that the day laborers had struggled to maintain. But some also have made the work dangerous for themselves and others. "They face the greatest dangers because [many of them] have not done day labor before, and they don't have the training," explains Eric Rodriguez, executive director of the Latino Union. </p>
<p>The arrival of new groups of increasingly desperate workers threatens to wipe out a decade of efforts to set pay and safety standards on the nation's street corners, says Nik Theodore, a University of Illinois at Chicago expert on day laborers. He is a co-author of a 2006 national study of day laborers, the first and only one of its kind. It is a grim accounting of what takes place on more than 500 street corners across the U.S. where day laborers gather early each morning to catch the best jobs. </p>
<p>On any single day, about 117,000 day laborers are out looking for work or are on the job, the study said. Three out of four of these workers, according to the study, are undocumented immigrants. But because workers often float in and out of the street-corner job market, it is estimated that as many as half a million people do day labor during the year. </p>
<p>The West Coast accounts for the greatest number of the nation's day laborers, over 40 percent, followed by the East, the Southwest, the South, and the Midwest. About 43 percent of the employers are construction contractors. Another 49 percent are either homeowners or renters. This makes the worker situation even more hazardous, since these employers are unlikely to have safety equipment or know about safety rules. </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>The danger of their work is a reality to the day laborers who reel accounts of falling off buildings, getting hit by falling construction supplies, and being trapped while digging ditches. Their stories help explain the 125 percent spike in the number of Latinos killed in construction jobs between 1992 and 2005, a figure that Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis called "unbearable" in a June speech to safety engineers in Texas. Seventy-five percent of the day laborers contacted in the 2006 survey said their work is dangerous, and one worker in five reported being injured on the job in the last year. But more than half of those injured did not get any medical care for their injuries, mostly because they couldn't afford it or the employer refused to cover them under workers' compensation, according to the survey. </p>
<p>Day laborers often turn to Chicago attorney Jose Rivero because he is willing to file workers' compensation cases against shady contractors with the likelihood of minimal rewards for his clients. It is not uncommon for contractors to file bankruptcy or simply vanish or to threaten workers against taking them to court or reporting them to officials, Rivero adds. </p>
<p>But he has been getting fewer calls lately and doesn't think that is because the work has suddenly become safer. The injuries he sees are "as horrible" as ever. "I think the economy is a big factor," he explains. Workers know that they will be "blackballed" by contractors if they talk to a lawyer, he says. Because they are desperate to hang on to the work, they don't take such risks. </p>
<p>But the day laborers' biggest day-to-day worry, according to the 2006 survey, is getting paid. Nearly half said they had not been paid by an employer in the months just prior to the survey, and another 48 percent told of being underpaid. There has been no comprehensive survey since 2006, but my reporting suggests that these trends are worsening. </p>
<p>Chris Newman, Legal Programs Director for the National Day Labor Organizing Network, which links together several dozen groups that serve day laborers, says the level of wage theft "has been amplified by the [financial stresses] downtown. Before, you would be owed $200, but now it is more likely $2,000." Theodore of the University of Illinois at Chicago adds, "I can't tell if you have unscrupulous employers taking advantage of what's happening or it's the financial problems facing those higher up in the contracting chain." </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>As the ranks of the workers on the streets have swollen in the last decade, day labor activists like Newman have steadily complained about the federal government's failure to stop the wage theft or to halt the unsafe conditions the workers face. Now, they say the Obama administration should take these steps: </p>
<p>First, the Labor Department should increase the ranks of investigators in its Wage and Hour Division, the office responsible for making sure employers do not cheat workers out of their wages. Kim Bobo, author of the recent book <i>Wage Theft in America</i> and head of Interfaith Worker Justice, a Chicago-based group organization, praises the administration's plans to hire several hundred more investigators. "But that's not enough. They need double the number of investigators," she says. </p>
<p>Second, employers need to live in fear that will they face stiff fines for violating federal wage and worker-safety laws. They should not be allowed to negotiate down the penalties so that overworked federal bureaucrats can clear the cases. The likelihood of serious penalties should increase for employers with repeat violations. "Every time we file a case, [the Labor Department] settles it for 50 cents on the dollar, and that means workers don't get what they are owed," says Bobo, whose organization operates a network of worker centers around the U.S. She adds that the government should make employers' violation records more "transparent" and accessible so businesses can be tracked. </p>
<p>Third, the government should develop direct ties with day-labor and worker centers, creating a system that will regularly inform workers of their rights and educate them on safe workplace practices. Theodore says the government should use the locations as worker development centers, where they can train and improve workers' skills. By authorizing the centers to directly file workers' complaints, the government can also expand its investigative outreach to the workers, he says. </p>
<p>Fourth, federal offices serving day laborers should be more accessible to workers, especially in the case of undocumented immigrants who are both fearful of visiting government buildings and who usually cannot enter them because they lack proper identification. "The agencies are designed to serve bankers, not low-wage workers who cannot make a 3 P.M. meeting," Bobo says. So, too, she says there need to be more government workers able to communicate with the largely Latino day-laborer work force. After the Katrina disaster, the government was hard-pressed, she recalls, to cope with the number of Spanish-speaking day laborers drawn to the recovery work in New Orleans. </p>
<p>To Newman, however, the most important step is "harmonizing" the government's immigration and labor-enforcement policies. "If undocumented immigrants are unable to come forward and form unions and file complaints and get redress from unscrupulous practices, then the bad guys will continue on," he says. </p>
<p>As for prospects of the Labor Department improving its day-to-day performance, he is quite upbeat about Solis. "The team that she is assembling is fantastic," he says. "There are all the indications that the U.S. will get its Labor Department back after eight years of self-mutilation." </p>
<p>Solis, the daughter of Latino farmworker immigrants, tells me her agency is hiring 250 investigators, some of whom will be bilingual. She wanted more, "but we didn't have the money." Besides "looking at increasing penalties" against employers who break the laws, she also plans to create a strike force to focus on firms with the "most egregious abuses." If the companies cooperate, the agency will offer them training and assistance, she says. And if they don't want to comply, "we are not going to sit around," she adds. </p>
<p>The agency will closely investigate how employers who use the government's recovery funds treat their workers. "They better know we are taking a different approach here," she says. As for workers' fears of dealing with a government agency, she vows to increase the agency's links with organizations that "have the trust of the community." </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>Help dealing with abusive employers or those who put him in dangerous situations could not come fast enough for Guillermo Caicero. Not long ago he got into an argument with a contractor who promised him $15 an hour but paid him only $10 an hour when the work was done. He complained and the employer called the police. But the police "didn't do anything," he says. </p>
<p>Four years ago he tumbled off a roof and broke a leg, he says. Several months ago, the 50-year-old day laborer dislocated an arm on the job. Not long ago a pipe also fell and hit his head, sending him to a hospital. But the contractor refused to pay for treatment or time lost, and Caicero was not covered by workers' comp. He went to a county hospital and was able to get free care, Caicero says. </p>
<p>Despite it all, here he is, on the corner, waiting and waiting. </p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:40:27 +0000148228 at http://prospect.orgStephen Franklin